3 Mistakes I Made When Validating My Idea
I’m sure you’ve had an idea for an app or website before and thought to yourself “This idea is going to be huge! Everyone’s going to use and love this”.
AND you’ve probably have heard the expression “ideas are a dime a dozen, execution is everything” (everyone on Quora says it a million times).
The reality is.. that it’s true, in fact, most ideas are sort of worthless because it needs validation to actually give it any weight. Most successful startups stemmed from a different idea entirely, usually due to the feedback they received from testing their initial idea before building a product.
I am here to share the mistakes I made with validating my startup in the past year, so when you start your own app or website or whatever business, you can avoid these mistakes and save a tremendous amount of time and money.
Mistake #1: The Design Thinking Process
Design thinking is the process of finding a current problem within a select group of people. It involves interviews with your key demographics that fall into your hypothesized target demographic for your idea. The basis of design thinking is to observe and analyze.
When design thinking, you typically ask open-ended questions where the recipient tells a story, then you go back to the voice recording and decipher a problem that person faced. Once you repeat this process, you transcribe it and see where the similarities are with each person you interviewed.
When we thought of our initial idea for Beepyo (— rent anything from anyone platform), we were sure that it was a significant problem with college students, because that’s where we experienced the problem ourselves. We went to 5 different colleges in the SoCal area asking 7 -10 students, at each college, a series of questions that would help validate our hypothesis.
Here’s where we made the mistake: we assumed too much and asked leading questions, to hear what we wanted to hear. We were focusing too deeply on the solution we wanted them to use and not enough of attention to the problem they were facing. We were also neglecting entirely different demographics that could have had the problem we were looking for and limited our discovery to college students because we thought it was the most “logical” approach. Maybe that statement in itself should have been a red flag that there wasn’t a market, to begin with if it was only a product for college students.
To avoid the same mistake we made, thoroughly define the problem you’re trying to solve before you go out there and do design thinking. Identify pain points of what your potential customers already use.
We were forcing a problem, to fit our solution, when we should have been finding a solution to fit their problem.
Mistake #2: Focusing on acquisition too early
This is a rookie mistake, bringing in too many people into the funnel without even knowing if you have product market fit.
We built our MVP after our “insightful” design thinking process. However, we failed to realize that there was a difference between product launch and marketing launch. We told as many people as we could that our product was live and was ready to use. The reality of it was that our product wasn’t even 100% built, the user flow wasn’t even that straightforward. In our minds, we thought it would be extremely useful if everyone was on our platform, more people we can bring, the better. It was naive of us and something to laugh about looking back on it.
We ran a series of contests, announced our launch, posted on social media, and even issued a local press release.
We acquired a lot of people, but the conversion was low, mainly due to our product not being the correct fit for people’s problem. We were telling people our product was the best, but in all actuality, it was subpar. This resulted in a pretty hefty churn rate, no one was coming back because it was difficult to use and not necessarily a good fit.
Lessons to learn from: It’s ok to have a not-so-perfect MVP to validate your product and collect feedback to iterate on, that’s the whole point of being agile. However, creating a lot of publicity for a product that didn’t fit our customer’s need made it difficult to retain people we acquired.
Recommendations: When building an MVP, keep it simple, don’t add too many bells/whistles, just focus on your main value prop. Release it to a small group of people and conduct 1:1 interviews with them to get their feedback. Iterate your product based on the feedback. Add users slowly through the funnel, until you have users saying they absolutely love the product and would recommend it to their friends.
Mistake #3: Iterating too slow
Failing to make your product better in a timely manner will kill your retention.
We did our “beta” launch at UCR from April — June. One of our fears was adding features and iterating based on a few people giving us feedback. We would constantly tell ourselves “it’s too early to tell, let people use it before we make any changes”. This logic holds true unless you’re getting significant feedback telling you otherwise.
Ironically enough, it took us 3 months to fix significant changes because we were trigger shy, this ultimately led to our churn rate increasing. Within a month we received the feedback we needed to improve our platform. After one month, all the feedback we received was consistent with the feedback from the first month. Ultimately, there was no new information after the first month because we didn’t iterate on the feedback in a timely manner.
Recommendations: If you do a small test with your product, focus on the feedback that makes the platform easier to use, if you’re given the same feedback from multiple people — implement it, and be wary of creating features that are too user specific. Above all, make sure to iterate your product in an appropriate time frame.
What’s next for Beepyo
Even though I listed our company’s mistakes, we didn’t necessarily do anything too crucial in limiting our success. We learned a tremendous amount in the past few months and got a better grasp on who our customers are and what their behaviors are like.
I genuinely hoped this helped you understand how to better validate your idea when you think of the next successful company!
